Cisco, LISP and workload mobility

By Cameron Sturdevant |
Posted 2011-07-28

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I spent another day getting tutored on LISP at the Cisco campus yesterday. See below for a bit more on the details of my day trip. But first, as promised, here's my Thursday update for what I'm working on this week.

Pretty much everything on my list from last week got carried forward with the following additions: An in depth story on the Open Data Center Alliance that follows up on my 9-part blog series on the association of cloud using companies. And now on to a brief report on my Cisco trip.

Yesterday was spent visiting the folks at Cisco, seeing again the Nexus 7000 (7010 and 7018) and watching the routing behemoths take the next step in data center networking. I'm writing up my observations for a review in eWEEK print and online at eWEEK.com. This is my second trip to San Jose to experiment with the Nexus giants.

The theme of my review is "how virtualization is changing networking." Cisco is implementing LISP (Location ID Separation Protocol) to enable workload mobility while eliminating the need to re-number IP devices. I'll do my best to explain LISP in the review, possibly taking a sidebar and a number of screens to illuminate what network managers should pay attention to in the technology. In a nutshell, the IP address is permanently assigned to the device (virtual or physical) and a location ID is used to locate the device in the network. This has positive implications for disaster recovery and workload migration to the public cloud.

LISP is still in early days and of course, you'll need equipment that understands LISP. There's more to come in my upcoming review and tech explainer.